Gus

Standing
Since 1988, Gus Griffin has been personally coaching some of Australia’s leading business executives, owners, elite athletes, celebrities and other specialists at the top of their profession – and continues to empower an elite international clientele today.

Also published alongside business-practice luminaries such as Tom Peters, Marcus Buckingham & Ken Blanchard (in Leadership Excellence Magazine), Gus is an innovative world leader in enhancing individual & team performance. His most important contribution to date – Instinx® Performance Coaching – selectively improves aptitude (natural inclination and talent) to produce unprecedented and lasting gains in performance. Instinx is currently being delivered by licensed practitioners on three continents.

Background
From before his 18th birthday (in 1970), Gus was writing successful ad campaigns—ultimately for leading brands and multi-nationals in Asia, North America & Australia. In the 80s, in Australia, in the process of mastering the rest of the marketing mix he discovered the untapped potential of cyberspace and went on to pioneer pre-internet online comms & marketing: designing & launching one of the earliest telex/email interchanges; designing & manufacturing cutting-edge communications terminals; inventing next-gen market research methods; etc.

Through leading such initiatives, he came to focus more on management than marketing. As partner in a venture capital firm, he then put this experience to work forging management teams for new ventures and shepherding them toward productivity and profitability with an 80% success rate.

Life’s Work
Alarmed by the runaway pollution he was seeing on business trips, in 1988 Gus abandoned “business as usual”, winding up his conventional ventures to focus full-time on speeding up the adoption of sustainable practices by industry. Pinpointing adaptive ability as a critical limiting factor in this transition, he undertook to reverse engineer the mental processes governing human adaptation to discover how to get managers and owners of businesses adapting to ecological realities more readily. Using his coaching practice as a ‘living laboratory’ to ensure practical results, all of his coaching clients have been willing and enthusiastic ‘guinea pigs’ in this cutting edge research.

The result — Instinx® Performance Coaching — you can read all about on this blog and at www.instinx.com

Personal Values

We humans have invented our way into an incredible mess that now threatens our very existence. There’s no going back, so we have to become even more inventive to get ourselves out of it.

Instinx can now make you more inventive and adaptable than you ever thought you could be.

Connect the dots.

My entire focus these days is on empowering people to drive needful adaptation. This little prayer I penned some 15 years ago, and the following extract, best express what drives me personally:

Excerpt from the Great Attitude Great Instincts ebook:

“The particular assault upon Nature’s mysteries which has resulted in Instinx began in earnest in August of 1988. At the time, I was a management & marketing consultant with an international practice, partner in a venture capital firm and director of an executive training college.

“Having become aware of the severity of the global environmental crisis, I had recently divested all managerial roles and shareholdings in polluting activities and was puzzling over my future direction. Before I could decide that, I felt I really needed to understand the situation much better. The question I wanted to answer was basically:

Why are the corporate and political leaders of the industrialized world continuing to make things worse environmentally—even though it is now threatening everyone’s survival?

“Over the next year I narrowed down the problem to something very simple to state—resistance to change—but not at all simple to remedy.

“I had eliminated as mere excuses all the economic, technological and political reasons given for continuing to pollute and warm the planet. All such arguments turned out to have a common cause: simply the lack of will to make the changes necessary—which were well within the bounds of our technological and economic capability.

“Our captains of industry, and their political counterparts, were dragging their feet. We were destroying our planet for nothing more sensible than that.

“Some people think it’s a system problem. They blame it on corporatism—critically described as an enduring form of legalized irresponsibility and enforced worship of the dollar. Their arguments are persuasive, but which comes first, the leadership or the system?

“There are corporations today achieving far more than you or me to solve the problems of the environment. Unfortunately, there are many, many more corporations inexorably continuing to do the opposite. The only functional difference between the two is their leadership, not their system.

“The planet’s saviours have faces and sit in boardrooms. The planet’s destroyers have faces and sit in boardrooms. What is the real difference between the two?

“That’s what I saw it all came down to. If I could figure out what the first guys have and how to give it to the second guys, then we’d have it made.”

* “Sustainability is clearly economically feasible: for the basic needs of a healthy, comfort­able lifestyle, but not to support the squandering of resources and manpower on fads and destructive commodities. We have got to give up making and selling things just because some fool can be found to buy them. This is the biggest crime currently being perpetrated against the human race: more genocidal in its consequences than any ethnic-cleansing we have witnessed in recent decades.

“Environmentally, the world can no longer afford most of the crap that currently clutters up our houses, garages, offices, landfills … and bodies — and it’s our children and grandchildren who will have to pay the price: many with their lives, the rest with their quality of life.

“To give just one easily-recognisable example of a workable economic solution: in most countries of the world it would be a relatively straightforward exercise to adopt a rationed ‘war economy’, redeploying all resources into strictly ‘essential industries’, to support a prolonged campaign against global warming, given the will of our leaders to implement it. The remaining countries, which lack sufficient civil structure to make this possible, do comparatively little polluting anyway.”

“A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that
which is provided for them.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery